


The Snow Woman

by inksmith



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Gen Work, Rule 63, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21889165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inksmith/pseuds/inksmith
Summary: Teresa Nightingale and Peggy Grant deal with someone freezing people to death in London.
Relationships: Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 18
Kudos: 58
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Snow Woman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reine_des_corbeaux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/gifts).



> You asked for case fic and Rule 63 fic - I have a million thoughts on a universe where wizards are all women, and hopefully you enjoy this bit of them!

It wasn't unusual for us to get called in days or even weeks after we should have been – we might have been magic, but we were still a unit that was ninety percent women in a Met that sometimes called us WPCs if they weren't thinking too hard.

Even so, you could tell Nightingale was unhappy about the month the head of missing persons had waited before picking up the phone. Worse, Johnson hadn't even had the courtesy to come in person to our tiny office in the basement of Scotland Yard. In Nightingale's eyes, that was a sin on a par with suggesting that she might find it easier to wear trousers than an ankle length skirt, or not putting your tea cup back on its saucer – she had, as she liked to remind me, grown up in a time when 'ladylike' was a compliment, and manners cost nothing, Peggy, it wouldn't hurt you to remember that.

"Just imagine if she'd become a governess instead of a copper," Guleed always said, because I'd once, while drunk, admitted that Nightingale's resemblance to Mary Poppins freaked me out a little, and Guleed liked to torment me after that one time I took her to my favourite lesbian bar and we maybe made out a little on the dance floor.

"They probably thought it was natural causes," I suggested, following Nightingale down to the car park as she proved, again, that you really could stride purposefully in a skirt and buttoned boots. I still went for the traditional female detective's outfit of a trouser suit and practical boots, but you had to admire her. "More than a hundred people die of exposure to the cold every year."

"I suppose no-one would find it unusual that fifteen of them occurred in and around London in the last four weeks," Nightingale agreed. Still angry about Johnson then. 

She waited until we were in the Jag to discuss it any further. "Most of the people who die of exposure to the cold are homeless people with nowhere warm to sleep. These victims aren’t from that group. I want you to speak to the last victim's partner while I meet with Abdul. See if you sense anything at their home."

"You're not coming with me?" It wasn't actually compulsory in the Met for non-uniforms to travel in pairs, but Nightingale did her level best to change that, never sending any of the four of us out alone if she could possibly help it. Wizards working alone, apparently, had met with a number of terrible fates over the course of her career, and even after working with her for two years, I hadn't done any better than the others in the unit to convince her that radios and mobile phones would change that.

"This has been going on for over a month, and the weather forecast is for more cold weather. We need to know more about what's causing these people to go to their deaths, and we don't have a lot of time to find it."

She was right – according to the coroner, each of the fifteen people found dead in the parks of London, apparently frozen, had died only forty-eight hours after the one before. Johnson still didn't seem to think the clear pattern meant anything – as far as he was concerned, they were just people who'd wandered away from home and had the misfortune to die. If not for Stephanopoulos' intervention, we probably wouldn't have been called in at all. As it was, assuming whatever was leading to the deaths kept to its pattern, we were due another frozen body tonight. Which wasn't very comforting, when it was already most of the way to dark.

"I want you to call me as soon as you leave the house," Nightingale added. "Do not go looking around the house, particularly if you sense any magic there."

In retrospect, I definitely should have listened to her.

*

The house was your typical inner London ex-council house, in the middle of a row of terraces and distinguished only by the cat flap in the front door. Likewise the woman who opened it – a brunette white woman in her mid-forties, wearing a dressing gown over jeans and mismatched socks. She had the slightly confused look of someone who'd been woken up unexpectedly, and she teared up a little when I introduced myself as being with the police. 

"Call me Karen," she said, walking me down the narrow corridor to the kitchen at the back of the house, all shining chrome and the kind of marble countertops you didn't often see in this area. "I’ll make some tea."

Her husband, she explained when I asked, had been in bed with her when they'd gone to sleep the night before he died. She'd woken up alone, but apparently that wasn't unusual.

"He had an early start?" I prompted.

"Well." She sat own opposite me and gave me the look I recognised from every day of my police career. The one that said, since we were both girls together, she was going to over-share. On the bright side, the over-sharing usually turned out to be useful. "I'm not saying that there was anything to it, but the girl who moved in across the street in the summer seems to need a lot of help in the early hours of the morning. I assumed she'd called him again."

"So you think he was having an affair?"

"Let's just say, she doesn't seem to believe in curtains." 

I wasn't going to get a better chance than that to feel around the house. "I assume your bedroom window looks into hers? Could you show me?"

Karen, unfortunately, insisted on following me up the stairs and into the front double bedroom. As she'd said, the window looked into those on the other side of the narrow street, and one house did have the curtains open and the lights blazing in the empty room. I barely noticed though – the residual magic hit me the moment I crossed the threshold, a blast of ice cold terror much stronger than any trace magic I'd felt before. 

"Is everything all right?" Karen had followed me into the room, was moving closer to where I was standing. "Miss Grant?" she asked, and the cold intensified and –

Like I said, I should have listened to Nightingale's advice.

*

When I woke up from being – hit in the head? Magicked somehow? Zapped with a freeze ray? I wasn't sure, though the way I was violently shivering suggested it might have been the latter – I was on my back in what appeared to be a field, but was almost certainly actually one of London's parks. 

However I'd got there, it must have taken a while, the sky dark with only a sliver of moon visible right above me, and the air that crisp, frozen cold that you only got in the dead of night and the middle of winter. 

None of those seemed like a good sign, though they all paled when I tried to sit up and realised that I was, quite literally, frozen to the ground. Or maybe into it – I couldn't really feel my arms or legs.

"You're awake." The woman's voice came from somewhere near my head, too far back for me to look at her, and sounded deeply irritated. "Normally, they don't wake up."

Even without being able to see her, the voice – and my own common sense – told me it had to be Karen. Nightingale was definitely going to double-down on her team not going anywhere alone after this. "Maybe you didn’t do it right," I suggested. I tried to form a were-light, but the cold must have been getting to me – nothing happened. 

"Maybe." A hand appeared on the edge of my vision, ice-white, and long fingernails tapped my cheek, a quick burn of colder against my already frozen skin. 

"Or maybe it doesn't work as well on women. All your other victims were men, weren't they?"

She scratched me, hard, across the cheek, in response to that, the blood warm against my face, but her voice when she spoke was soft. "They were lost. I guided them. They didn't know where they were going without me."

I hadn't spent much time looking at the victim files, but I couldn’t imagine there'd be anything in there suggesting they wanted to freeze to death. "Like your husband?"

She sighed, her hand coming to rest on my shoulder. Even through my suit jacket – you couldn't, apparently, freeze people to death while they were wearing coats – I felt the intense cold of it. "He didn't understand that we belonged together."

"No?" I concentrated on her hand, how much colder my shoulder was than the rest of my body. 

"He loved the winter," she said quietly. "We met at an ice rink, like a story."

I made encouraging noises, and twitched my right little finger. My hands were buried, but only lightly.

"He was enough. All thee years, he was enough, even in the summer, the heat…"

I eased my hand up, let my fingers curl in towards my palm.

"But then he chose her – a summer child, how could he not understand the betrayal?" 

"That sounds terrible," I said, and threw the were-light right at her hand, still resting on my shoulder. She screamed, drew back, breaking whatever had been holding me in place. I rolled onto my feet, clumsy with the cold, and sort of stumbled down onto her.

She screamed again, right in my face, but I had my hands on her wrists, my weight on her legs, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. 

"Stop screaming," I said, even though she ignored me. "You're under arrest."

And that was when Nightingale turned up.

She's Nightingale, so there weren't any dramatic expressions of concern for my well-being, but she refrained from pointing out that I'd clearly done something to get myself into this situation _and_ put her trench coat round my shoulders while we waited for uniform to come and pick up Karen.

Which, it turned out, when Nightingale finally used a quick bit of magic to stop the screaming, wasn't actually her name. 

"A snow woman," Nightingale said. She'd offered to let me go back to the car, but I was still shaky from the sudden freeze, as well as unsure that I could find my way out of Hyde Park in the middle of the night. I really didn't want to wander into some of the things I'd seen happening in Hyde Park, back before Nightingale picked me for her unit. Instead, we were leaning, perhaps ironically, against the joy of life fountain, currently turned off for the winter.

"I remember a friend of mine talking of them, once," Nightingale continued, politely ignoring the way I shuffled closer and leaned into her arm. Even without a coat, in November, she was warm. "Her brother came into contact with one, on a trip to Japan. Her brother always claimed he was spared due to his exceptional looks, and skill at the violin."

I looked at Karen, sitting on the path in front of us, a couple of leaves in her hair and her hands cuffed behind her back, and tried to imagine her being swayed to mercy by someone's talent at the violin. "I got up to grade four at the recorder in school," I told her. "You could have asked before you tried to freeze me to death."

Unsurprisingly, Karen didn't say anything, or even look at me. Nightingale laughed, though, which made it worth it. 

Of course, then she asked me what, exactly, I'd been thinking to walk around a house where an unknown magical event had occurred, but she had come rushing out to save me, so in the end, I felt like that was a fair trade.


End file.
